It's scary for the people I'm writing to :-) Tutorials like these are for my dad or brother, who have never fiddled with another programming language for more than a few minutes. The script header bit is just getting them into the habit of documenting in the first place. I agree that once they're ready for POD, they should switch over. But as it is, I'd have to explain POD, formatting, perldoc, and package global variables (which means I'd have to at least glance at packages and scoping).

Tutorials like these are for my dad or brother, who have never fiddled with another programming language for more than a few minutes.

Is this how you talk to your dad? And isn't that they don't aspire becoming programmers the reason for not having fiddled with programming languages? Are they, for some reason, unable to read books like Beginning Perl?

Anyway, I recommend that you let them read a good existing tutorial. It saves you a lot of time, this monastery weird tutorials and lets your dad and brother learn Perl without getting to think programming is for teletubbies. I suggest http://www.steve.gb.com/perl/tutorial.html.